K2

by Ed Viesturs

  “Porter stages, load sizes, fees, rest days, etc., all became open to negotiation,” Curran elaborates, “and almost every expedition was dogged with strikes, go-slows, and thefts. Some expeditions even failed to reach Base Camp and a vast amount of ill-will was generated.”

  By 1992, the authorities had worked out most of the logistical kinks. Porter strikes were not a problem on our approach to base camp. After the chaos of 1975, the Pakistani Ministry of Tourism had established fixed wages for the porters. Foreign climbers had to pay the standardized rates, and the porters had to accept them or go home. On the other hand, when I had to hire my own porters in Askole for the eight-day trek to base camp, I was so poor I could afford only three porters to carry my four loads, so I ended up humping my own sixty-pound pack all the way in.

  Our so-called team was disorganized from the start. To save money themselves, the Russians had decided to drive overland all the way to Rawalpindi. They got there long after we Americans did. After cooling our heels for a frustrating week as we waited for the Russians, my teammate Thor Kieser and I decided to snag a last-minute trekking permit and hike in by ourselves. Scott had already left Askole with his own trekking permit, escorting two paying clients to base camp in an effort to fill his nearly empty pockets. Along the way, Thor and I caught up with Scott and his trekkers. By the time we arrived at base camp on June 21, only a five-person Swiss team was on the mountain.

  In retrospect, it’s obvious to me that from the very start, our expedition was plagued by stress and frustration. But I was so gung ho at the time that I ignored the distractions. After all our preparations, it was beyond my wildest dreams to be camped beneath the holy grail of mountaineering, and for weeks I floated along on a manic high of enthusiasm and hard work.

  Not long ago, I let a friend read my K2 diary. He made an interesting observation. “Ed,” he said, “do you realize that the writing in your diary is far more blunt and critical than anything you write for publication, or anything you say when you give a slide show?”

  No, I hadn’t realized. But when I recently reread my dairy, I saw that my friend was right. As I’ve said, the diary was for myself—I never expected that someday someone else would read it. So I’m sure I used those daily entries to vent my frustration. I tend to be nonconfrontational, so I guess that writing in my diary was a way for me to let off steam. I also believe that in certain tense situations, it’s often best to let it ride, rather than venting immediately, because hard feelings tend to smooth out with time and reflection. The question, though, is, which version is the truer account of what happened on K2—my diary or what I’ve written for publication?

  There’s an old and honored tradition in exploration literature that you don’t air your dirty laundry in print. Whatever bickering, name-calling, grudge nursing, and dark funks really took place on the expedition, they’re nobody else’s business. You can read the whole of Sir John Hunt’s The Ascent of Everest and never suspect that a single cross word was exchanged by the climbers who supported Hillary and Tenzing’s monumental push to the summit. Maurice Herzog’s Annapurna—the bestselling mountaineering book of all time, and the book that more than any other inspired me as a teenager and made me want to become a climber—characterizes the 1950 French team as an ideal brotherhood, with each member making heroic sacrifices to support the others and, in the end, even to save their lives.

  When I learned, about a decade ago, that that wasn’t the whole story, that there had been plenty of conflict and resentment on the first ascent of Annapurna, I felt only slightly dismayed. By then I’d been on enough expeditions to see for myself how interpersonal conflicts and team dynamics play out. The new revelations about Annapurna didn’t change the feelings I’d had decades earlier, when I’d first read Herzog’s book. It still seemed a heroic tale of struggle, camaraderie, sacrifice, and eventual success.

  With the counterculture revolution of the late 1960s and the 1970s came a new trend in expedition literature. In the new narratives, the dirty laundry was not only brought out of the closet, it was put on prominent display. No two books more vividly embodied this tell-it-like-it-was aesthetic than Galen Rowell’s In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods and Rick Ridgeway’s The Last Step, which chronicled, respectively, the 1975 and 1978 American K2 expeditions. Rowell and Ridgeway not only highlighted every interpersonal showdown among their teammates, they remembered (or recreated) blistering dialogues to dramatize them. A sample from Ridgeway:

  “I just talked to Lou,” Cherie said acidly. “I’m tired of hearing all this stuff about Terry being upset. Everyone whispering behind our backs. You’re all bastards. Bastards, bastards, bastards.”

  “Look, we could care less what goes on as long as it doesn’t affect the team and the climb,” John said.

  “What do you mean what goes on? I’m sick of all this gossiping,” Cherie started to cry.

  After those two books were published, some of the team members—the ones portrayed in the most unfavorable light, of course—felt betrayed. But a younger generation of readers responded with gleeful enthusiasm: So this is what really goes on during expeditions. The elders of our tribe, the traditionalists, were aghast. I read Rowell and Ridgeway’s books when they came out, and I could relate to what they wrote. But I’d never publish the kinds of intimate details from my expeditions that they sprinkled on virtually every page of their books.

  The debate persists today, although the tell-all school has gained a comfortable edge. I’ve never been exactly sure where on this spectrum my own views lie, though they’re certainly far to the right (if right is conservative) of Rowell and Ridgeway. Since I’ve never written a book-length account of any of my expeditions, I’ve never had to commit my beliefs on this matter to print. In No Shortcuts to the Top, there were certainly plenty of real antagonisms that I downplayed or even avoided mentioning altogether. At the same time, I’ve sometimes been accused of being too much of a “nice guy,” even of subscribing to that old motherly admonition “If you don’t have something nice to say about somebody, don’t say anything at all.”

  I’d be the first to admit that the kinds of rows and resentments recounted by Rowell and Ridgeway are exactly what goes down on expeditions. The question remains, whose business is it beyond the members of the team?

  What my friend pointed out was that in the privacy of my diary, I’m closer to Ridgeway than I might otherwise think. K2 in 1992 was undeniably an expedition fraught with conflict. It may be that the version of the story that I told in Shortcuts soft-pedals that conflict.

  From the hike in onward, for instance, one of my teammates really bugged me. Let’s call him “Joe” to protect his identity. Here’s some of what I wrote:

  Joe already split to go to base camp. I’m kinda glad because he’s starting to drive me nuts. He’s always gotta pipe into a conversation and add something. He’s already “conquered” K2 in his mind. He has no patience and he can’t keep his mouth shut.

  Joe went up alone today [to Camp I] and is spending the night. That is a bit stupid in my opinion. He’s in a hurry for no reason. Climbing K2 is a marathon and he’s sprinting! He’s a bit of a lost soul and I think he’s looking for recognition and attention.

  • • •

  Joe talks & talks & talks. Sometimes it’s nice to have peace & quiet but he doesn’t know when. Scott & I keep on reading & Joe keeps on talking. He also keeps borrowing stuff. Doesn’t have a spoon, toilet paper, shave cream, etc. Not very well prepared.

  Inevitably, on expeditions, cabin fever sets in. You’re in such close proximity to your partners day and night, 24-7, and under such tension about whether you can get up the mountain or not, that every last thing some guy does or says can drive you crazy. It gets especially bad when you’re trapped together inside a small tent during a long storm. It can get so that the very sound of him chewing his breakfast or blowing his nose threatens to push you off the deep end.

  This can happen even between best friends, let alone
among virtual strangers you’re thrown together with on an expedition. Fortunately, in 1992 I was with Scott most of the time, and we got along great. That was a particularly good thing, since neither of us ever bonded with the Russians.

  Another source of tension that summer was the perception on the part of a few that we were competing with the international team led by Rob Hall and Gary Ball. Both of our teams would be hard-pressed to find adequate campsites on the Abruzzi Ridge. It was usually first come, first served when it came to grabbing those precious sites.

  It was at base camp that I first met that famous New Zealand duo—Hall & Ball, as everybody called them. They had a vast amount of experience in the Himalaya, and they’d pulled off a tour de force by climbing the Seven Summits—the highest peak on every continent—in only seven months. And this was already their third attempt on K2.

  When I first shook hands with Hall & Ball, I thought, Oh my God, these guys are superstars. They’ll leave me in the dust. But Scott told me, “Take it easy, Ed. They’re just normal guys.” Then, on the mountain, I discovered that I was as strong as or stronger than these superclimbers. There were days when I broke trail and fixed rope for them and Hall & Ball trudged into camp hours after I did. That was a real revelation.

  During those first weeks, Scott and I paired up with Hall & Ball to fix ropes up the lower part of the Abruzzi Ridge. (Only a few of the other members of our team contributed to this effort; the rest seemed unwilling or unable.) In general, Hall & Ball cooperated well with Scott and me as we shared the grunt work of establishing the route. I got more and more frustrated by some of the half-assed efforts of other guys on the mountain. Some of them would carry only the lightest loads; they’d claim the conditions weren’t good enough for a heavy carry. And sometimes they’d get only halfway to the higher camp so they’d just dump their loads in the snow and head down. I picked up a bunch of those loads, but I drew the line at carrying other guys’ oxygen bottles for them. If they couldn’t get their own oxygen to the higher camps, how the hell did they expect to use that oxygen to go for the summit? Eventually, we worked it out so that the folks hoping to use oxygen higher up labeled their bottles with their names. That made them solely responsible for moving the bottles up the mountain.

  It would have helped a lot if Vlad had turned out to be a real leader. But from the get-go, Vlad was strictly doing his own thing. He was just not a team player. So without any real plan or structure in place, everybody else started doing his or her own thing as well.

  The frustration of taking on more than my share of the work, of having other climbers shirk their responsibilities, and of having no leader who would assign tasks built inside me into a towering resentment. But I kept it all inside; I never blew up and chewed anybody else out. (That’s typical for me, I’m afraid—I tend to avoid overt conflict.)

  I didn’t mention this in Shortcuts, but the reason I tried Everest solo the next year was because of my disappointment with the poor teamwork on K2. I’ll always pull my own weight, and I’m happy to pull even more than my weight, as long as others genuinely try to contribute. But after I got back from Pakistan, I said to myself, Look at how much time and energy you wasted on other people. Why not go on an expedition where all that time and energy benefits yourself?

  On rereading my diary, I discovered that even before I got to Pakistan, I’d anticipated the underlying problem that would divide our team from within. On June 6, as I sat in JFK airport waiting for my flight to Asia, I wrote:

  Hopefully Scott & I will jell and climb as a strong team on K2. There will be a fair amount of attrition from the other team members but that doesn’t surprise or worry me. It’s typical on a long, arduous trip such as this. Scott is built like a brick shithouse and we’ve put a lot of sweat & tears into this, so there is no lack of desire. We haven’t climbed together, but I feel we know each other well enough by now to form a solid, strong team.

  By 1992, I already knew that the thoroughness and intensity of preparation you put into an expedition translate directly into commitment on the mountain. Before K2, Scott and I had spent ten months planning, training, and scrounging together the dough to afford our expedition. By the time we got to base camp, we were truly committed, and we were willing to stay as long as we needed to in order to get up the mountain.

  The same wasn’t true of all of our American teammates. They were all gung ho at the start, but after a month, some of them lost motivation and started complaining about how hard everything was. Scott and I wanted to say to them, “Of course it’s hard. What did you sign up for?” (In their defense, a few members of our team did have inflexible deadlines by which they had to return to their jobs.)

  Climbing an 8,000er is a sufferfest. You need a lot of patience. As it turned out, after forty days on K2, Scott and I weren’t even thinking about going home. I didn’t have a girlfriend then, or a steady job, or any other particular reason to go home. I thought, Hell, I’ll stay here for four months if I have to.

  That doesn’t mean I didn’t have my apprehensions about the climb beforehand. Downing a couple of beers at JFK, I wrote:

  So many things can happen for better or worse. I just hope we all return safe and can count to 20 using our fingers & toes. With the right weather, good conditions and health, we can climb K2. But it’s gonna be a bitch.

  Throughout my eighteen years of attempting 8,000-meter peaks, I’ve always been a stickler for getting into great physical shape before each expedition. I’ve felt that my training during the months prior to a climb would not only increase my chances of success but would make me climb more safely. If I could climb faster and stay strong day after day, I could minimize some of the inevitable risks of exposure on those great peaks. With a bank of endurance stored up, even if something went wrong at the end of a long day, I hoped I would have the strength to keep moving. If I failed on an expedition because of lack of preparation or training, I would have only myself to blame.

  Not every Himalayan mountaineer feels the same way. The legendary British climber Don Whillans was famous for letting himself go between expeditions, drinking heavily and eating so much he actually got fat. On the hike in to his next objective, his own porters sometimes teased Whillans about how out of shape and overweight he was. Amazingly, on the mountain he always rounded into form. He reached the summit on one of the greatest expeditions in Himalayan history—the south face of Annapurna in 1970—and he was one of the strongest climbers on the pathbreaking attempts on the southwest face of Everest in the early 1970s. On the other hand, Whillans died of a heart attack at the age of only fifty-two. His lifestyle almost certainly contributed to his early death.

  Right from the start on K2, my training paid off. Even in my diary, I’m not comfortable bragging about being fitter than other guys on a climb, but some of my entries make it pretty clear that that’s what was going on. On July 2, I wrote:

  We had planned to finish fixing all the way to C II today. Everyone was slow today, so I grabbed 3 ropes and started out by 6:45 A.M. Had to re-break trail to our high point of last eve. Got there by 8:30. Everyone was still way back so I started stringing rope on my own…. Fun, 3rd class stuff.

  Rob [Hall] finally caught up but was going slow so I kept leading out.

  Scott typically didn’t train as hard as I did, but he had tremendous natural stamina. The genes he was born with enabled him to look like Captain America without really having to work too hard at it. He also had the distractions of a family and a business, which limited his workout time. As early as June 26, I wrote, “It was fun to climb with Scott today. He’s super strong, competent and easy-going. I hope we summit together.”

  From the start, as it turned out, Scott and I were slightly stronger than Hall & Ball. And they were planning to use supplemental oxygen up high; Scott and I were not. Still, we felt a huge respect for these likable veterans, and I was thrilled to work hand in hand with them. Their previous knowledge of the route was invaluable. On July 1, Scott and I reached
Camp I before Hall & Ball and set up our tent. From my diary: “We left a bomber site for the Kiwis just to be nice & diplomatic. Otherwise it looks like we’re racing each other up the mountain just for good tent sites.” Usually, when you get to a camp—especially on a route like the Abruzzi, where there are so few good platforms—you grab the best site you can find and claim it with your tent. Instead, Scott and I deliberately left the best platform for Rob and Gary, just so they wouldn’t think we were being hypercompetitive about getting up the mountain first.

  At about 21,500 feet on the Abruzzi, you encounter the first real technical obstacle on the route. It’s an 80-foot-tall fissure that splits a nearly vertical rock cliff; in the back of the fissure there’s usually a narrow gully of hard ice. The pitch is called “House’s Chimney,” after Bill House, the American who first climbed it in 1938. It took House two and a half hours of desperate struggle to get up the chimney, which forms the crux of the route all the way up to the Shoulder, at 26,000 feet.

  According to Jim Curran:

  In 1980 Peter Boardman, arguably Britain’s best Himalayan climber at the time, climbed House’s Chimney and was impressed and surprised at its technical difficulty. He thought that when it was first climbed it must have been the hardest pitch in the Himalaya. Certainly it was far harder than anything climbed on Everest in the 1920s and 1930s.

  As it turned out, on July 2 Scott and I were the first climbers from our team to reach the base of House’s Chimney. One of us would get to lead it, going first on the rope and placing “protection” to shorten a possible fall. Then, once the leader had climbed the pitch, he’d string fixed ropes for all the other climbers to use. Although the Swiss team had gone up the chimney before us, as they were attempting a fast and light ascent, they’d relied on the decaying strands of rope from previous years that still hung down the crack. Scott and I didn’t trust those old, frayed ropes, and we weren’t about to put all our weight on them.